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Talk:Who's Who in Star Trek, Issue 1
Was there something wrong with the previous arrangement of this publication? --8of5 19:19, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :Yup, I'm separating the first and second issue. These are huge info books and folding them together was causing me to look things up here on MB, try to find which issue it was from, and then have to go back to the source and flip through both books to find out which issue was being referred to by our citations. :For an example, I'm working on USS Surak stuff. If I was looking for information on the birdlike doctor, I'd see a citation to his Who's Who appearance on Memory Beta, but without an issue specified as both books were sandwiched into one article. :I'd then go back to my books to try and find his citation. His name is Chu-sa, so, alphabetically, i'd try issue 1 first. but the only information about him is in issue two under "surak, uss". so to look up a citation about Chu-sa, i ended up flipping through two comics when this refinement to our site could have saved me the trouble by allowing our articles to cite and have separate reference pages for each issue. -- Captain MKB 19:25, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Conversely if you know he was in this two-part product, but don't know which part, you now have to scan through the reference lists of two pages, sifting through chunks of duplicate information, to find the link to this character, when originally you only had to hunt through one page. But I'm more worried about the implications for other two-part subjects we have (all bar one other currently occupy a single page) if this sets a precedent. --8of5 19:32, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :Well, size could certainly be considered an issue, as when/if this article is sufficiently fleshed out, fitting it onto one page would be ludicrous. Of course, that concern applies to many other two-part topics that have been crammed into one page. -- Captain MKB 19:35, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Or this could just be an issue of information heavy sources, be they published in two parts or one. If you have one page for a two part story you get one page, with 100% of the content, if you split it in two you get two long pages because of information being repeated in both halves, so they're still at say 75% of the content/page length, but in doing so means we have two pages to maintain instead of one, and that our readers have to work through two pages, instead of one. Again, adding unnecessary complexity. --8of5 19:44, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I really don't understand all these concerns of making users read through more articles. Users come here to read articles, and the links are quick and direct (the meaning of the word "wiki")... surely, and impressive array of well fleshed out articles will not disappoint. A direct citation to issue 3 or issue 57 will lead a user through to the references just as quickly. -- Captain MKB 19:50, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Users are here to find information, they shouldn't have to do more work than necessary to find what they are looking for. The duplication you get from splitting a two-part publication into two articles is an example of creating more work for a reader trying to find the information they are looking for. --8of5 19:53, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I'm starting to see how completely arbitrary your concerns are, however -- if I wasn't sure what issue of IDW Schism a certain reference was in by going to the IDW Schism page, would I have to navigate all three issues to find them? Yes. But Schism remains in three separate issue articles, despite that drawback. You're saying that if a person wants to find a specific reference in Who's Who, they should go to one unified article. Why unify the DC book but not the IDW book over the same problem? -- Captain MKB 20:13, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Ah, this old argument has come around again. Although I know how this always end, I will, once again, side with Mike on this particular issue. :) --The Doctor 20:43, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I merely followed the precedent of only merging two-parters when creating the Schism pages. I would not object to merging Schism though, or any other stories that are split into parts without any sub-title to more distinctly separate them (and thus imply they are separated only for the convenience of publication), as is currently the case with N-Vector. :And nice to see you Doctor! :) --8of5 20:47, July 25, 2010 (UTC) ::My feeling is that all issues should have separate pages, since those are the original story releases. Sure, the "arc" article or "series" article should have a brief overview of the series, but each story is an individual item, since they're published that way, even if later collected into a single trade paperback or omnibus. Hell, if you do things that way, then the entire Marvel run should be in one article, since IDW published an omnibus collecting the entire series... no? :) -- sulfur 20:51, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Well no, because I'm not arguing anything to do with how stories were later reprinted, just how they were initially released based on their titles, if they were individual titled, or titled as parts of one whole. Anywho, I seem to be outvoted so far. Are you guys actually going to fix all the links necessary when splitting or these articles or just make a nice big mess? --8of5 20:55, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :If the vote goes that way then I'm sure that we'll work together as a time to ensure that the changes are made. Remember all that stuff when the wiki changed name. I'm also sure that others will abide by the vote and execute the changes as they edit as well. :) --The Doctor 20:58, July 25, 2010 (UTC) ::I'm gonna agree with Sulfur, the doc, and Mike. Since they were originally published as seperate issues they should be represented that way here on MB. The only one that I'd consider an exception for is 2 part episodes...--Long Live the United Earth 21:37, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :::Reply: I wouldn't consider collapsing Schism into a single article, for the same reason I am in agreement with the other commentaries here. Individual comic issues are all individual to themselves. Two part episodes of course are usually better served as Memory Alpha topics, as canon rather than our noncanon focus, so I'd agree, purely for the convenience of those that are novelized as single books. :::As to the work of fixing links, of course it would be a task to be approached and worked on. In fact, I'd much rather spend 6 hours fixing 1,000 links over spending even 1 hour arguing about the viability of writing them. -- Captain MKB 22:03, July 25, 2010 (UTC) I see a lot of talk here, but the article still looks like crap. I'll let ya'll finish whatever it is you're doing, then I'm going to fix it. – AT2Howell 20:52, July 27, 2010 (UTC) :Excuse me? - Captain MKB 21:16, July 27, 2010 (UTC) ::This discussion has been taken to User talk:AT2Howell‎‎. --Columbia clipper 21:40, July 27, 2010 (UTC)